Sunday, November 02, 2008

Retribution Utility Idea

It's 1 AM, and I had an interesting idea for Retribution PvP utility. We'll see if it's any good in the morning.

GuiltRank 0/2Requires 1 point in Crusader StrikeRequires 45 points in Retribution talentsGives the Paladin's Crusader Strikes a 50/100% chance to increase the target's Global Cooldown by an additional 100% for the next 30 seconds. Stacks up to 5 times.

Effectively, hit the target once with CS, and her GCD becomes 3s (2s for Rogue/Cat), 2 hits for 4.5s, etc., all the way up to 5 hits for 9s. (Assuming zero Haste, of course)

It's something that no other class can do. It messes with tempo, slows the fight down, and is anti-burst. It hurts instants more than spells with cast times. Yet at the same time, it doesn't affect a specific individual spell, only how often you can cast spells. It sort of becomes a counter to the Haste stat.

I have no idea how this would work with mobs. It's probably a PvP-only thing.

Thoughts? Would this actually be worthwhile in PvP, or should I get more sleep?

15 comments:

Interesting idea for PvP, but impossible to balance and probably grossly overpowered. Cooldowns impact different classes in different ways. Essentially, you're making a regularly occurring silence effect, albeit a short duration.

Oh, man. Can you imagine what this would do to Rogues? Waiting 6 seconds between using any of their abilities? Dropping their DPS to ~15% of normal? You wouldn't *need* CC any more, because with a full stack of this up most classes' damage output would approach zero--and this is while you're pwning them in the face with your two-hander.

Of course, it's likely that you wouldn't see a full stack of this very often, because anyone who's been hit five times by Crusader Strike is probably dead.

I can see how this would be interesting from a retribution standpoint, but as said above it's most likely very overpowered. Getting hit once with CS as a healer would double my global cooldown?! Am having my hands full dealing with retribution burst as is, thank you very much ;-)

This is an interesting idea, but it definitely lasts a bit long for something that you are hitting players with anyway on a 6 second cooldown. Even a single application shuts down half the classes in the game for up to 50% of the time during a 30s window. I think it could work, you'd just need to either shorten the duration or put it on something that has a cooldown long enough to keep it from being stacked..

Good idea, but you're probably going to need an internal cooldown to keep it from being grossly overpowered, something like 3 seconds or so, enough to double or triple the GCD, but too spaced out to drag you out to a 9 second GCD unless you totally fail to burn down the retribution paladin.

Hmm this would be a good balance for ret paladins failing at all casters. And since global cooldown doesn't stop wanding or auto-attack it wouldn't really stop all damage. Might work well. All I hope is that someone from blizzard reads this blog. Helpful suggestions seem so hard to come by for how to fix ret. What other forums/blogs/etc do you guys read that have constructive posts?

I just get the feeling that this ability would be grossly overpowered. I get the idea you're going for, but this implementation basically shuts down most of the classes with even one application. It's not like a silence where even when affected, a caster can switch to another school and continue attacking.

Yes, it would be tough to stack up to the full 5 applications in a single battle, but even doubling the GCD will ruin a lot of classes.

And to the people who are commenting about how this affects casters, unless the player gets more then one stack, this ability doesn't really affect them at all. Remember that most spec main attacks are 2.5~3 second cast times anyway (or have a few second cooldowns). The GCD would be up when the spell is ready again anyway. This ability isn't anti-caster (by default), it's anti-melee. After the second stack, though, it basically ruins everyone equally.

The numbers would need tuning and the coding might be nearly impossible. Aside from that, it's a pretty creative idea. And yea, as others have said, this would completely mess up rogues. But hey, what goes around comes around *cough* dismantle.

I could see 2 stacks for 200% GCD, but 5 would be pretty bad... get a 5v5 arena with 5 paladins, all CS one target and that person is pretty much out of the match for 30seconds(and you can just refresh it to keep it on longer).

I had an idea that I thought would be kinda cool and unique for helping close the distance to kiters. A 30yrd range "DoT"(I call it a DoT because it doesnt really have a better way to discribe it) that only does damage when the target moves 5 yards. It also reapplies itself when it ticks and stacks upto 5x, doing something like 200-300 damage per stack and would last 10 seconds.

If the target didnt move, they wouldnt take damage from the DoT and it would go away after 10seconds(they can still CC/Slow/Snare/Root/knockback/stun the paladin to keep them out of melee range)... BUT, if the target did move and didnt stop, they would very quickly be getting ticks of 1000-1500 damage every 5 yards they moved. I thought about letting abilities that non-kiters have remove the effect, like Cloak of Shadows, pali bubble, mass dispell, shamanic rage, "bear"zerker, berzerker rage, etc. so that it couldnt be used vs someone that doesnt kite.